The Framing of music over time

I think I’ll start with a musical subject that is often as unintentional as it is intentional. I am thinking about how current and older recorded music is recorded and produced. While the technology used during different periods is often the driving force behind the different actual sounds of recordings, I can’t help but notice how elements of that sound are also shaped by society—by how music is perceived and consumed. I should clarify that what I’m interested in, in this case, is the space the music exists in: the framing, not necessarily the subject itself.

The first recordings were made by a stylus that scratched or incised an analogue of sound waves onto a moving recording medium. Although some thought certainly went into arranging performers around the recording apparatus, the possibilities for designing the perceived recording space were extremely limited. Recordings would generally have been made in a smaller room or, at best, a small hall. These were also similar to the kinds of spaces in which many performers usually performed. An orchestra, or even a full brass band, would require a larger space simply because of its size—again, a space that would have been familiar to the performers.

Beyond deciding who would be closest to or furthest from the large conical horn used for recording—essentially the only form of “mixing” available—the limited bandwidth required some unavoidable adjustments to the sound, and performers often had to alter how loudly, and sometimes how, they played. Still, the recording was largely the documentation of a live performance. The framing that I am interested in here was therefore only partially controlled. It was, to a considerable degree, an accidental result of practical and mechanical concerns, even if the resulting acoustic space remained familiar to the artists.

Next came electrical microphones and electrically driven recording systems, allowing a much more advanced version of the same basic process. There also began to be an ability to control the electrical signal itself through technologies such as equalization and, later, compression, although these technologies came into use gradually over time. The sound improved considerably, and the rooms in which music was recorded became an increasingly important part of the process. Sound stages and studios could be designed, selected, and controlled to suit the music. At least for the most successful artists, the acoustic environment became something that could be deliberately shaped. While these spaces became more controlled, however, they were still real spaces.

I would divide much of the rest of this history into two broad periods: the magnetic-tape era and the digital era. I say “broad” because there were many other important technological changes during this time that altered both how music sounded and how it was recorded. For what I’m discussing here, though, this is the important divide.

With the widespread adoption of magnetic tape beginning in the late 1940s, recording moved decisively away from the direct mechanical inscription of a performance and toward an increasingly flexible electronic process. Tape brought better sound, easier editing, and—eventually, and most importantly for this discussion—multitrack recording.

Multitracking allowed recorded music to move away from being purely the capture of a live performance and toward something more like composition. It became possible for a recording to present a much more idealized version of a performance than had previously been possible. A performance no longer necessarily had to occur at one time, or even within one physical acoustic space, in order to sound as though it did.

At the same time, the recording engineer’s ability to control both sound and space expanded enormously. Relative volume, equalization, dynamics, reverberation, spatial placement, and eventually a growing range of special effects could all be manipulated with increasing precision. The “room” heard on a recording no longer had to be simply the room in which the musicians had performed.

Digital recording slowly began to take over in the late 1970s and 1980s. At first, it functioned largely as a digital replacement for magnetic tape machines while still relying heavily on existing analogue sound-control equipment. Gradually, however, nearly the entire process—other than the continuing use of microphones and other transducers at its boundaries—could take place digitally, inside computerized systems.

The short history of how these technological changes altered the way music is framed interests me because many of the same technologies that transformed recording also transformed human society. Over time, the framing of recorded music—leaving aside, for now, changes in the music itself—became increasingly insular and divorced from the physical world.

The spaces heard in recordings could become fantasy worlds rather than representations of actual rooms.

This, I think, also changed the implied relationship between the artist and the listener. Recorded music increasingly became capable of creating a close, one-to-one relationship. The listener is no longer necessarily being invited to witness a group event occurring within a shared space. Instead, the listener can have what feels like a private, intimate experience with a constructed musical world—one that may never have existed anywhere outside the recording itself.

Here’s a good place to end. More on this in my next post.